MAKING A ‘CATCH THE FRUIT’ GAME WITH MMFS

Table of contents

Table of contents ..................................................................................2

Welcome ............................................................................................2

Things we want to see in our game.............................................................2

Making our moveable character.................................................................3

Adding the fruit ....................................................................................5

Making the drop occasionally ....................................................................6

Collecting the fruit .............................................................................. 10

Welcome

This tutorial will guide you through the creation of a simple little game called ‘Catch the

fruit’. This tutorial will cover basic game making techniques, collisions, movements,

creation of objects and inserting objects from the MMF2 libraries.

“Catch the fruit” is a simple game that can be made in many variations. This version of

the game is probably the simplest version of it.

Things we want to see in our game

Making a moveable character

Occasionally created ‘fruits’ fall down from the top of the screen

You gain points by collecting the fruit

You loose points by missing a fruit

More fruits drop over time to make the game harder

We want our character to be controlled by the

player of our game, so we will go to the

‘Movement’ tab in the properties sidebar. In the

“Movement type” property, we select the ‘Eight

Directions’ movement type. With this movement

we can move our character around in a ‘Zelda’

like way. This isn’t suitable for our game, so we

need to restrict the directions the player is

allowed to move in.

To do that, click the ‘Directions’ property and remove the arrow from all the directions

except the arrows turning left and right. Now our character can only move left and right.

Also change the speed of the character to something around 32. We don’t want the

game to be too easy do we?

If you open the animation editor for our “Runner”, you will notice that it already have

walking animations for both left and right so we don’t need to modify this object’s

animations to make it look right. You can test the application to try the controls for our

runner sprite.

You might notice that our player can run outside the borders of the screen which

shouldn’t be possible. So we simply open up the event editor and make an event to

prevent it.

Create a new condition from the ‘Runner’ sprite called “Test position of ‘Runner’”:

In the dialog that pops up, you simply click arrows

that indicate a movement leaving the frame. In our

case we click these arrows marked with a red circle:

Here the condition is: “Is our object leaving the frame

at the left or right?” We can then simply make a

“stop” action to prevent the object from leaving if the

condition was true.

We should now have an event that looks like this:

Adding the fruit

For our game we wanted some fruits to drop from the top of the screen once in a while.

For this we can use more of the library graphics that comes with MMF2 used together

with MMF2’s inbuilt movement systems.

We can find some nice fruit sprites from the MMF2 libraries at:

“Games -> Miscellaneous -> 07fruit” (Or “Fruits”) Drag them into the frame so we can

use them in our game.

Now select all the fruits you have dragged into the frame. It should look like this:

With the inbuilt pinball movement, we can make

our fruits fall down in a “realistic” way. When

they are created, they fall slowly but will quickly

accelerate like any other object with gravity in

real life.

We then apply the pinball movement for all of

the fruits by selecting it from the list.

If you test the application, they will drop really

fast, making them almost impossible to catch. So either we could make the ‘Runner’ run

faster or we could make the fruits fall slower.

For this example we’ll try the latter and make the fruits fall slower. We set the gravity

and initial speed to 6. You don’t need to change the fruit’s Initial direction but I have set

these fruit’s initial direction to right (0) and left (16).

You can now test how the fruits fall down from the sky obeying gravity.

Making the fruits drop occasionally

For this little game, the fruits should drop from some flying object. We’ll find a suitable

graphic that can fly around in the top of our screen, randomly dropping some delicious

fruits.

In the graphics library “Games -> Spacecraft -> Spacecraft” there

is a sprite called “Small UFO” which we can use. Drop it at the

top left corner of our frame. We need this little UFO to move

around in some sort of pattern or following a path. For this

purpose we can use the built-in “Path Movement”.

Select the UFO, go to its movement properties

and select ‘Path Movement’ for it.

Then click the ‘Edit’ button to edit the UFO’s

path.

This is the path movement dialog box that will pop up after you clicked ‘Edit’.

With this we will draw the path we want the UFO to follow.

To begin drawing the path, you click the second button from the left. Now simply draw a

curvy path at the top of the frame like if you would draw with a pencil tool in a paint

program. Here is an example path.

If you test the movement now, the UFO will quickly go through the path and stop, but

that is not what we want. We want it to slowly follow its path and continue in a seamless

loop.

To change the speed, drag a selection box around all path nodes so they are selected.

On the Path movement dialog box, you move the slider bar to a lower value than 50.

Speed 18 is a good value. We also want the movement to repeat itself when it is

finished, so we click the “Loop the movement” button.

If we didn’t position the last node exactly where we started, the UFO will move slightly

each time it finishes its movement. To fix this, we click the “Reposition object at end”

button to make sure it will never move away from its original position.

We should end up with a dialog box that looks like this:

Try out the game and watch our little UFO move around the screen.

Now for the fruits:

MMF2 has simple timing functions which we can use for the fruit creation.

Let’s make some fruits drop more often than other:

Every 3rd second create an apple,

Every 5th second create a banana,

Every 7th second create some grapes.

MMF2 makes it much simpler to do these kinds of timings than other development

systems where you constantly need to compare the current system time to some initial

value. Here it is only necessary to tell MMF what you want to happen every three

seconds and it will magically happen.

Make a new ‘Every’ condition. You can find it in the Timer object which is one of the

default objects that is always included in every MMF2 application.

Change the “Seconds” slider bar to the value 3.

Every action you put into this new event will happen once every three seconds. So if we

put a ‘create object’ action into our ‘Every 3 seconds’ event our objects will be created

every third second.

At the ‘Create new objects’ object you find in the event

editor, you right click and select the ‘Create object’

action.

In this dialog you are asked which object you want to create. Simply select the apple

object and click ‘OK’.

When this “Create Object”

dialog opens, you can then

choose the coordinates

where your object should

appear. If you drag around

the ‘creation point’ you simply

tell MMF to create it at that

exact spot, but we want the

apple to be created at the

UFO, not at action coordinates. So simply click on the UFO object on the frame to

create the apple relatively to the UFO.

You will notice that the ‘creation point’ will not overlap the UFO to

begin with when you click it. If we leave it there, the apples will then

be created at that position relative to the UFO. This would look odd as

the apples would pop out of nowhere but close to the UFO. So drag

the ‘creation point’ up to the centre of the UFO. Alternatively you can

simply write the value ‘0’ into the X and Y boxes. Then it will look just the same as in the

first picture. Press ‘OK’.

Test your game and watch how the UFO will drop the apples every three seconds.

To sum up what we have actually done in the event editor, here is a snapshot of our

events as seen in the Event List Editor.

By using only two lines of “code”, we have achieved to make a UFO fly around the top

of the screen dropping apples that falls downwards, make a controllable animated

player that is prevented from exiting the screen at the left and right. Simple isn’t it?

In the event editor, create a few more events that creates the fruits, but change the time

between each fruit drop.

Collecting the fruit

Until now, the fruit would pass right through our player. We need to add an event for

each fruit that we want to collide with our player.

Your new event should look like this one:

This event basically asks MMF2 “Have our runner just collided with an apple?”

When the answer for that question is “yes”, it is our job to tell MMF2 what we then want

to happen. In our case we want the apple to destroy and

we want to give the player some points.

So in our new event, in the cell below the apple, we right

click and select the ‘Destroy action’:

To give some score points to the player, we right click below the ‘Player 1’ object and

select the “Score -> Add to score” action.

You can decide how many points you want to award the player for collecting the apple.

In this tutorial I decided to give the player 5 points.

Just like before, continue these steps to add collision test events for the other fruits.

After the other fruits where added, this is

what the Event List Editor looks like:

As you can see, I’ve made the banana

andthe grape fruit drop with bigger intervals

so they don’t drop as often as the apple.

I’ve also changed how many points the

player will be awarded when they collide

with the bananas and grapes.

Currently there is no way the player of our

game can watch his/her score, so we head

back to the Frame Editor and insert a

Score object.

When you insert the new score object, it will display a small black ‘0’.

If you want to make the font bigger and change its colour, select the score object and go

to the font properties in the Properties sidebar:

Here I’ve changed the visible font and style of the

score.

There are still a few things left to do before we are completely finished with our small

game. If the UFO drops the fruits too close to the borders of the screen, the fruits can

fall out of the screen making them impossible to collect.

For each fruit object we have, we make

an event similar to the event that

prevents the

‘Runner’ object from leaving the frame:

In these events you add a ‘bounce’ action below at the correct fruits. This will make the

fruits bounce back into the frame if they are about to leave it.

Finalizing your game

Our game is pretty much finished; all we need is to spice up the game a little.

Here are some things for you to try:

Change the frame background colour to something else than white

Add some backdrops from the library to make the game more visual appealing

You can also try adding sounds that will play when you collect your fruits. See the

documentation how to do this.

Done

Thank you for reading this tutorial. I hope you have gotten some insight in simple game

creation with Multimedia Fusion 2. If you have any questions regarding this tutorial, you

can always post a question on the Clickteam forums at www.clickteam.com